My new, weird smartcard and how I learned to use it

Published on , 3568 words, 13 minutes to read

An image of a golden hill in front of a sunset, forgiveness, color tinted skies, matte painting
a golden hill in front of a sunset, forgiveness, color tinted skies, matte painting - Stable Diffusion
Cadey is coffee
<Cadey>

Hey, this article is going to talk about something related to a subject that is fairly divisive and I want you to seriously re-evaluate your reactions before you act on your first impulse. I've been working towards my goal of being a better, less toxic person and something that has come up repeatedly in that self-re-evaluation is that I have been horribly toxic against people that like cryptocurrencies.

I have been needlessly horrible to people. I have sowed toxicity. I have furthered divides that do not need to exist. A lot of this has been out of the fear of inadvertently scamming people or leaving people open to be scammed, but after deep introspection, I no longer want to be known for that. It feels so right in the moment, I feel that fear and I have lashed out in anger because of it.

No more. I do not want to be known for fostering hate, resentment, or anything adjacent to it. If you were one of the people I have hurt with my toxicity, I whole-heartedly apologize and I am going to reach out to the people I feel I have hurt the most to apologize privately.

As you read this article, please try to take things at face value and reconsider your gut feelings as I have been. Hate is learned. Let's work to unlearn it. Fear can't lead to anger, hate, or suffering if we choose to not let it.

The best things in life come with disclaimers

When you speak for professional conferences, sometimes you get a goodie bag with random stuff in it. Recently I spoke at RustConf about authentication technologies. Among other things (such as a very nice picnic bag that I will be sure to make use of), I got a Ledger Nano X hardware cryptocurrency wallet. It is a custom engraved one too. It looks really, really nice. Here's a picture of it:

The device, looking vaguely like a USB stick with the engraving "it's getting dot in here" followed by the logo for Polkadot, some kind of blockchain thing

I am not really a Bitcoin person. Most of my experiences in the cryptocurrency space have been overwhelmingly negative. I'm pretty sure a huge part of the reason I was made to drop out of school has to do with the fact that a large part of my college tuition was being paid for with Bitcoin...through Mt. Gox.

Cadey is coffee
<Cadey>

It's worth noting that this is not a paid review. I was not asked to write this article. I consciously chose to write this article based on my experiences (mostly after the debacle with trying to use it as a GPG smartcard, see below). I am not involved with Polkadot, The Web3 Foundation or anything involved with that technology. I was given the device as part of a wide gift program with no expectations or targeting. I have no affiliation with Polkadot or the Web3 Foundation.

You can see how that would sour my views on cryptocurrency, eh?

One of the most positive experiences I had with cryptocurrency was when someone donated about $200 in ethereum to me. Coinbase let me turn that into money dollars fairly easily. Probably could have made more if I held onto it, but overall, it was a good experience.

Setting it up

So now here I am with this hardware key escrow device and now I need to figure out how to use it. I read that these things can also be used as very paranoid GPG smartcards, WebAuthn tokens, and even password managers. This is very interesting to me, even if I'm not totally jazzed about the other associated uses of such a key escrow hardware token.

Cadey is coffee
<Cadey>

Fun fact, I looked to see what the resale value of these devices are in the secondhand market. Turns out the target market for these things actively avoids secondhand devices. Can't blame them. This is a very paranoid device designed to cater to a very paranoid market. Buying such a hardware token second-hand is very counter to that view of paranoia. Arguably by finding any use for it I am preventing E-waste, but more on that later as the saga continues...

Either way, this thing is in front of me, so I want to see what I can actually do with it. So, I started out by unpacking it and going through the first-time-user-experience (FTUX).

Devices like this have a deterministic random-number-generator that is seeded by an initial entropy seed. When the device generates this entropy seed, it also creates a recovery phrase for it. The recovery phrase is a 24 word series of random English words that correlate to hexadecimal values. This allows you to be able to load that seed into a new device should your old one break. Because all of the randomness is deterministically generated from the original seed, this means that you can recreate all the private keys for all of your cryptocurrency accounts without the private keys ever having to leave the old device. Even if you totally obliterate the original device. This is pretty neat.

Another neat part about the FTUX is that when it presents the recovery phrase, it asks you to write it down (and even includes a little card for you to do so). Once it's shown you the whole phrase and you've written it down, then it does something that both surprised me and has really made me rethink cryptographic key generation in general: it makes you confirm what every part of the key phrase are. It also puts incorrect answers in the options. This is genius. It both proves that you have written the passphrase down and that you did it correctly. If I ever make something that has cryptographic keypairs like this, I'm going to be sure to remember this and add it to the FTUX whenever I can.

So, at this point I have a hardware cryptocurrency wallet set up and after following the instructions for setting up the app, I got a prompt to update the firmware. I did. I got another prompt to update the firmware. I did.

Mara is hmm
<Mara>

Weird that it didn't just slipstream the two updates into one big one. I would have expected it to do that.

After that was all done, I enabled "Developer mode" in their app and downloaded the following apps:

At this point I realized that the CAD$200 device in front of me only had two megabytes of usable storage. This feels like a very small amount to me, but when I looked at the filesizes of the apps it turns out it's okay. At this time with those apps, I'm only using 1/4th of the total storage of the device.

Mara is hmm
<Mara>

I wonder if they're using a smaller amount of storage because it's more durable. I also wonder if the lion's share of the cost comes from the hardware security element bits and the amount of validation and formal verification that goes into developing something like this. Either way, for the very small keypairs (Ethereum keypairs are 256 bits) that are being stored it's probably fine this way. Still kind of weird, but it's tolerable.

Numa is delet
<Numa>

They could probably cheat even and take advantage of the deterministic nature of the randomness to avoid storing the keypairs in the first place. If there's a deterministic random seed then you theoretically don't even need to store the keypair in the first place, just keep track of which "account" correlates to which entropy step from the initial seed. It'd be a bit jank but it should work perfectly.

Testnet testing

Now that I had everything set up, I decided to test it with a testnet transaction with the infamous Bitcoin testnet. In the past, the Bitcoin testnet has been something that I've used to validate that a cryptocurrency client is working. The Bitcoin testnet is effectively a second copy of Bitcoin that has a lot less traffic and it's mutually agreed that testnet coins have zero monetary value.

Numa is delet
<Numa>

Turns out money only has value if everyone agrees that it does.

I downloaded the app, generated an account on the testnet, then pasted the address into some random Bitcoin testnet faucet. Bitcoin "faucets" were public services that gave people a small amount of Bitcoin to test that they can make transactions. As Bitcoin grew in value, the level of abuse towards faucets increased drastically to the point that they stopped existing. The only remaining ones are for the Bitcoin testnet, which have no real monetary value.

I saw my account balance go up. Success! I had managed to use this hardware device for the purpose it was designed for. I was now a lot more confident in going off script and really having fun with the thing. After returning the testnet funds back to the faucet (this is considered a polite move), I deleted the Bitcoin testnet application from the device and started planning my next move.

Mara is hmm
<Mara>

If you delete the app, do the keypairs disappear too?

Cadey is enby
<Cadey>

No. Remember that the keys are deterministically generated from a seed value. This means you can reinstall the app later and get your accounts back. This also extends to the other applications on this device. This is one of the most genius ways to use deterministic randomness I have ever seen and is certainly why there is so much dire messaging around keeping your recovery phrase secure. I'm considering putting a copy of my recovery phrase in a safety deposit box or something.

FIDO2/U2F/WebAuthn

Hardware token based authentication has gotten complicated as standards have been developed. However, most of the tokens have standardized around the WebAuthn protocol, which uses a secure element to sign messages from a server and then the server checks the signatures to ensure the same device sent the message. This means that you can have a hardware token like a Yubikey to securely authenticate to remote services like Google, GitHub, and DashLane.

However, Yubikeys aren't your only option. The secure element in M1 macs can be used for WebAuthn. The TPM in your Windows 11 PC can be used for WebAuthn (I'm pretty sure this is why Windows 11 requires a TPM). And, the Ledger Nano X supports WebAuthn (via FIDO2).

You can set it up by following their documentation, but at a high level you do this:

Et voila! You have set up this hardware key escrow device as a security device. It should Just Work. You can test it by logging out of GitHub and then trying to log back in with the wallet unlocked. You will be prompted on the wallet to accept the request. You can say "yes" or "no" and things will work out.

I did have some problems getting it to work with Safari though. With Safari on my MacBook Air I'm not able to reliably use this device as a hardware security key. For some reason Safari keeps spamming signature requests to the device and accepting the signin is probably frame-perfect. I haven't been able to get it working, but it does work with Microsoft Edge. So there is that.

At first when I tried to use it on Windows 11, Windows got very confused. It kept trying to use my tower's TPM as a WebAuthn key. However things worked fine when I tried using it on my MacBook. It worked perfectly on Linux, to nobody's surprise.

I would be willing to say that this hardware cryptocurrency wallet is a decent FIDO2 key. It's also the only FIDO2 key I know of that makes you unlock the device with a PIN (one that you enter on the device itself) before you can use it. I don't think it's worth going out and buying one just for that though, it doesn't have support for ed25519-sk SSH keys in resident mode, which means that your SSH key can't be stored on the device itself unless you use GPG, which is kinda lame but understandable given the constraints of this device.

Mara is hacker
<Mara>

It will work for non-resident keys though! It is a lot cooler to put the keys directly on the device, but in a pinch it's okay.

Password management

This device is basically a hardware random number generator with a bunch of fluff about cryptocurrency on top. Secure passwords are basically just a bunch of random data encoded as printable characters. It's reasonable to go from "random data" to "password" with some trivial transformations.

This device has a password manager built in. You can install it by following the directions from upstream.

It will let you generate passwords from that base passphrase and then it can pretend to be a keyboard to type them out very quickly. I'm going to keep this around, but I don't personally see myself using this device as a password manager. I already have password managers do what I need.

However in a pinch, I could see this being a viable option. If I was a lot bigger into the cryptocurrency ecosystem and I was very paranoid about password theft, I'd probably want to use something like this as a password manager. If only because the PIN-lock would make me feel better about it.

Cadey is coffee
<Cadey>

The placebo effect is real.

GPG

Okay, I've been putting this off for long enough. Let's go over the final boss of security hardware: pretending to be a GPG smartcard.

GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) is one of the oldest, most mature, and widely known privacy ecosystems in the world. The basic idea is that it gives you a keypair that you can use to do the following things:

One of the main downsides is that the user experience is awful. It is so bad. I have tried to use GPG in the past and failed numerous times. Including but not limited to accidentally creating a key that can't be used for anything.

I knew I was in for a ride, but I didn't quite think it would be as bad as it was with this device. So I opened their documentation and looked at how to do it on my mac. It looked normal at first, then I got to this part that I am going to quote verbatim:

Mara is sh0rck
<Mara>

W...what. In order to use a security device they want you to disable the trust layer of macOS to append some XML to a random file? How on earth is that safe? What were they thinking???

Cadey is coffee
<Cadey>

Yeah, I've been trying to keep a positive tone for this article and assume good intentions, etc. But oh god this is like a red flag the size of Australia. What the hell where they thinking? This is kind of hot take worthy even though that goes against the anti-toxicity point I raised in the header of this article. I really don't know what to say here. I am kind of speechless.

This understandably discouraged me from trying to use the device as a hardware PGP key (though if it worked as one it would be quite possibly one of the best conference swag gifts ever, if only because something that I only use as a GPG key would be so invaluable, you have no idea).

Last night, on a lark I decided to try using it anyways. It worked on my MacBook Air without having to crack open the readonly seal. I was shocked at first, then very annoyed that the docs both told you to do something extremely very wrong and they were outdated.

Whatever. It works as a GPG smartcard. That makes it worth using for me in particular. I don't really use GPG much, but when I do it's going to be nice to have my keypair already set up and ready.

The battery saga

When I unplug the device, the screen turns off. I thought this was normal. Turns out it isn't. It has a 100 milliamp-hour battery in it. The battery isn't working on my device. I have tried charging it with the following devices, just in case:

I can't get the device to charge. It only works over USB. This is okay-ish for a smartcard, but it would be nice if the device worked up to the manufacturer's specifications. You know, just in case I actually use it as a password manager for some reason.

I contacted the manufacturer, who was very confused and said that I didn't have an order registered in their system. Understandable. I didn't have an order, this was a free gift from a conference sponsor.

I got in contact with the sponsor and apparently they're just gonna send me a whole other hardware wallet so I guess I'm going to have two of them. Hopefully one of them will have a working battery.

Numa is delet
<Numa>

Yummmmm, sweet e-waste!

Conclusion

This device is an okay hardware token. It is a very paranoid security device and if you are actually into cryptocurrency, it's probably a decent option. I'm not into cryptocurrency though, so I am a bad person to take this kind of advice from.

A friend of mine that is very into cryptocurrency has told me that Ledger is the "bad option" for hardware wallets and that most of the mindshare is with Trezor devices. These devices also apparently have the best UX. I don't know for sure. I only have a Ledger Nano X in front of me, and if this is the bad option, then better options are surely much easier to use.

I just wish this wasn't tied to cryptocurrency, but I can deal with it. Can't beat the price!

As an aside, during the process of trying to figure things out, I tried to read into how some of the currencies that the Ledger app supports work. The level of jargon is impressive and impenetrable to someone like me without very much context as to what is going on. This is how people outside of tech see our profession. This really gives me pause and has made me wonder how we can make things in tech more equitable so that other people can come up to speed more easily.

Maybe things should be written in a way that is easier to understand and gradually introduces jargon as the user gets more familiar.

Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

Tags: gpg, fido2, webauthn, 2fa, smartcard